The Netherlands and Denmark have much in common: both are rich, flat, windswept, laboriously democratic and industriously agricultural. Plus: bicycles. But there is one aspect where they have diverged in the past 20 years. Denmark became an improbable global culinary mecca. The local, seasonal New Nordic movement began with René Redzepi’s Noma and ended up inspiring a generation of chefs to forage, ferment and interfere with celeriac in elaborate ways. As with haute couture, New Nordic trickled down to the high street and so Danish supermarkets turned organic and introduced the populace to new products such as spelt and wild garlic.
 
Meanwhile, the Dutch food landscape remained a wasteland, so much so that my family and I holidayed there last year precisely because they knew that I wouldn’t be distracted by trying to find nice things to eat. In my head, there is always a better restaurant just around the corner and it’s a notion that has tormented my family for years.

Now, though, the Danes seem to be reverting to type. Beyond a couple of dozen properly wonderful restaurants – nearly all of which are in Copenhagen – the food landscape here is becoming quite lamentable. Beyond the capital, restaurants still serve stuff that they buy frozen in bags. Judging by the products that occupy the most real estate in supermarkets, the Danes are surviving on Dr Oetker’s frozen pizza and processed pork. Fresh produce has taken a drastic dive in quality over the past couple of years: hard, sour peaches are the latest abomination to join water-filled chicken, bendy leeks and suspiciously coloured salmon fillets on the shelves. Today virtually all of the supermarkets in Denmark are low budget; independent fishmongers, grocers and butchers are effectively extinct.

“The disparity between the restaurants in Copenhagen and what you see in the supermarkets is horrible – and it’s getting worse,” TV chef Adam Aamann (the man who transformed the classic Danish open sandwich two decades ago) told me recently. “Often, I go to the supermarket and I think, ‘I need to take photos of this and post it online’.”

Adam and I pondered the reasons for the regression in Danish food culture. Has Covid numbed our tastebuds? Was inflation behind the decline in organic consumption? He blamed the supermarkets which, he pointed out, have a stranglehold over the Danish grocery market. With a captive clientele, they simply don’t need to worry about quality or diversity of produce: they compete purely on price.

But I have another theory. As with the Dutch, might there still linger a latent distrust of sensual pleasure, a Lutheran disapproval of hedonistic indulgence, deep in the Danish soul? René Redzepi once told me that his fellow Danes consider food as fuel; he believes that their attitude is rooted in their parsimonious Protestant past. I thought that he was exaggerating, or at least that things were changing for the better, but it appears that I was wrong. 

Recall Karen Blixen’s short story, Babette’s Feast, set in a pious 19th-century Jutland community scandalised by a French émigré who lavishes her guests with “sinful” gourmet food. What has changed?

This is also the nation that more recently invented Wegovy, a product intended to deny its user sensual pleasure; a drug created to stop people eating. Novo Nordisk needn’t have gone to all the trouble of harnessing that vindictive little GLP-1 hormone to curb our gustatory desires: Danish supermarkets are taking care of that all by themselves.

Booth is Monocle’s Copenhagen correspondent. While the majority of supermarkets suffer, some are doing things right – here is our rundown of the world’s top five. Still hungry? Monocle’s 10-point plan details how to make them feel inviting again.